When you call an electrician, you get a price in five minutes. When you call your surgeon for a knee replacement, you get a blank stare. One of them works for you. The other one works for an employer and an insurance company. And until the specialist side of medicine wakes up to that, patients will keep getting shortchanged on both cost and care.

In this conversation, I sit down with a board-certified podiatrist who lived the insurance-based model, watched her credit card bills stack up despite a full schedule, and rebuilt her entire practice from the ground up as a new mother in a new city. We talk about the moment she realized she wasn't actually working for her patients, the hidden reason a specialist can only spend six minutes with you, the shocking price gap between a lab your specialist orders and the exact same lab through her own practice, and the direct specialty care model that's quietly spreading across the country.

If you're a patient tired of feeling rushed, or a specialist wondering if there's another way to practice medicine, this episode is the map.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The reason your specialist has only six minutes for your appointment, and what changes the moment they walk away from the traditional model
• The hidden cash-price gap on labs, imaging, and prescriptions that even most doctors don't know exists
• The one mindset shift every specialist has to make before they can build a practice that actually works for them and their patients

Connect with Dr. T Nguyen

Website: www.teadpm.cpm

Website: www.drteapodiatry.com

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open
01:18 – Meet The Guest
02:22 – Eight Years Of Training And The Real World
04:25 – The New Mom Wake-Up Call
05:46 – Opening Her Own Practice In 2018
07:24 – When You Realize You Work For The Insurance Company
09:47 – Turning The Clock Back To The 1960s
11:13 – The First Year And The Stacked Credit Cards
13:00 – Learning To Have The Money Conversation
14:47 – Why Catastrophic Insurance Should Be The Point
16:15 – Why Direct Care Doesn't Break The System
17:35 – Why Doctors Became The Enemy
18:51 – Why Social Media Changed Everything For Doctors
19:41 – Inside The Practice: Membership, One-Off, And Surgical
21:48 – Ambulatory Surgery Vs Hospital Surgery
25:11 – How She Learned To Price Her Services
27:55 – The Hair Salon Price Comparison
29:15 – Preventive Podiatry And Diabetic Limb Salvage
33:00 – Why Nobody Values A Podiatrist Until They Need One
34:00 – Running A Practice With A Virtual Assistant
36:25 – How To Start Down The Direct Specialty Care Path
38:11 – Building A Patient Funnel Without Insurance
41:48 – Coaching Other Doctors To Do The Same
44:18 – Why Cosmetic Surgery Got Cheaper Than Everything Else
45:47 – The $250 Lab That Should Have Been $12
48:33 – The $9 Vs $19,700 Cancer Drug Story
53:21 – The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make When Going Direct
55:37 – Why Defensive Ordering Is Bankrupting Patients
57:57 – DSC Alliance And Health Sharing Options
59:39 – Why One In Five Claims Get Denied

In 1973, Congress passed a law that sounded like a gift. Pay one fee, we'll cover all your medical care. The public loved it. What almost no one realized at the time was that they would never see the price of a medical service again. And when you can't see a price, you can't shop, you can't compare, and you can't win.

In this conversation, I sit down with a physician who saw exactly what was coming, walked away from a lucrative anesthesia practice in 1997, and built something almost every expert said was impossible: a facility that posts every price online, that charges a fraction of what the local hospitals charge, and that has quietly become the model that self-funded employers all over America are now flying their employees to. We talk about the counterintuitive relationship between price and quality that almost no one understands, the reason the insurance companies fought harder than the hospitals to shut him down, the surprising truth about why so-called nonprofit hospitals are still ten times more expensive than his, and the movement now spreading state by state that will decide the future of American medicine.

If you want to see what American healthcare looks like when it actually works, this is the episode.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The 1973 law that quietly stripped every American patient of the ability to shop for their own care
• The hidden reason the cheapest healthcare in your area is almost always the highest quality, not the other way around
• The one type of buyer quietly rewriting how surgical care is priced in this country, and why the biggest hospitals in America cannot ignore them anymore

Connect with our guest Keith:

• Website: surgerycenterok.com
• Atlas Billing Company: atlasbillingcompany.com
• Free Market Medical Association: fmma.org
• X (Twitter): @SurgeryCenterOK

Chapters:

00:37 – The Anesthesiologist Who Walked Away
01:44 – The Rise Of The Administrator Class
02:48 – Bankrupting Patients For Carpal Tunnels
04:22 – The Mission That Started It All
05:31 – How To Build A Bundle In One Phone Call
08:16 – Why You Can Shop For Healthcare
09:00 – Why The Insurance Companies Fought Back Hard
11:07 – The Near-Death Experience Of 2005
13:22 – Launching The Website That Changed Everything
14:39 – The Canadians Who Showed Up First
16:06 – Undercutting Nonprofits 10 To 1
17:18 – "Not For Profit" Just Means "Doesn't Pay Tax"
19:31 – Why Physician-Led Care Wins
23:21 – The Nashville Operating Room Tragedy
26:05 – When Billing Machines Get In The Way Of Care
30:00 – Why Price And Quality Are Inverse
33:25 – The Indiana Website That Exposed Everything
37:38 – How Hospitals Spend The Overpayments
39:54 – Site Neutrality And CMS's First Real Move
42:56 – The VA Vitals Story
43:26 – If Your Doctor Works For A Hospital, They Don't Work For You
44:23 – The Free Market Medical Association
50:26 – The Patient Who Just Wanted To Pay Cash
53:11 – The Fiduciary Bomb Coming For Employers
55:57 – Smith Direct Surgical Care Goes National
59:50 – Why Self-Funded Plans Will Lead The Change
01:03:29 – Why We Need To Go Back To The Sixties
01:05:32 – Paying Surgeons What They're Worth
01:07:12 – Why We Turn Some Surgeons Off
01:09:00 – The Movement Spreading State By State
01:10:12 – Why Patients Fear Anesthesia Most

Every problem in American healthcare I have ever tried to fix somehow traces back to something Congress did decades ago and never went back to look at again. Some of it was well-intentioned. Some of it was worse than that. But all of it is still costing patients today.

In this conversation, I sit down with the one person in my life who has seen the American healthcare system from every angle: as a patient, as a mother, as a spouse, and as someone who has watched what really happens inside emergency rooms, operating rooms, and hospital corridors. We walk through the sixty-year-old rule quietly overflowing emergency rooms and prisons with mental health patients, the two-thousand-dollar trap Congress set for disabled Americans, the recent operating room tragedy that should terrify anyone with a surgery coming up, and the one rule change that could quietly fix nine out of ten of these problems overnight.

If you have ever felt like nobody in Washington is on your side, this episode gives you exactly what to say when you pick up the phone.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The 1965 law quietly overflowing your local emergency rooms and prisons with patients who should be getting care instead
• The hidden operating room chain of custody that recently paralyzed four healthy patients going in for a routine surgery
• The single reform every major law in Washington should be required to include from day one that would end the worst legislation without a single new fight

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open
00:14 – Why Congress Should Make Us Nervous
00:36 – The 1965 Rule That Broke Mental Health
02:37 – Why Hospitals Turn Away The Ones Who Need Care Most
04:59 – The $900 Million Bribe Vs Our $48 Rule
06:36 – Medicaid Expansion And The 90 Cent Trap
08:15 – The $2,000 Asset Limit That Traps Disabled Americans
09:52 – The Level Playing Field Standard
11:15 – Why We Need To Sunset Every Big Law
14:00 – The Knee Replacement Tragedy Nobody Expected
15:41 – When The Chain Of Custody Breaks
17:08 – Why More People In The Kitchen Means Worse Food
19:35 – The Fine Line Between Safety And Cost
20:35 – When Common Sense Beats Policy
22:04 – The Vecuronium Override That Killed A Patient
24:32 – Why Overrides Should Never Be Solo
25:20 – The Twin Delivery Emergency
26:56 – When The Patient Trusts You Anyway
28:39 – Inside The 340B Program Scandal
31:39 – How 1,800 Cancer Clinics Vanished
34:00 – Why Nonprofit Hospitals Are Sitting On A Fortune
36:24 – Section 6001 And The Physician Ownership Ban
38:48 – Why The 15-Minute Appointment Fails Patients
40:20 – The Epic Mandate That Broke Nursing Too
43:35 – Why Congress Listens To You And Not Me